The controversial, crowd-funded Librem laptop that aimed to be fully open down to the firmware but ended up shipping with an AMI UEFI firmware for the initial release has now been ported to Coreboot for the Librem 13 model. The Coreboot support wasn't done by Purism, the company behind the Librem, but rather a Coreboot developer at Google.

Now there is upstream Librem 13 Coreboot support pending, but it wasn't done by the company. Coreboot took to Twitter today and announced, "Hey [Purism]! Will you throw a party for [a Google developer] for doing the coreboot port for you?" There was also a second tweet taunting Purism over this port, but that was since removed.

Duncan Laurie of Google has published Librem 13 support for Coreboot, a port he did on his own. The port allows for Coreboot to boot the Librem 13 with Coreboot. However, it's not fully-open but relies upon the Intel firmware blobs, as is sadly the case for all recent generations of Intel processors.

All major functionality should be working with this Librem 13 Coreboot port while Duncan had to extract the VGA BIOS, management engine, and Intel firmware descriptor from Librem 13's blobbed-up BIOS. He also copied over the memory initialization and silicion initialization binary blobs from a Broadwell Chromebook BIOS.

It will be interesting to see if Purism makes use of this Coreboot port in future revisions of their Librem laptop.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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